


No Reckoning

by somegunemojis



Series: Tender Mercies [22]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:00:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26287609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somegunemojis/pseuds/somegunemojis
Summary: This isn't the first helicopter ride he's taken with a body bag, but it will be the last.
Relationships: Bettino Tahan/Alessio Rossi
Series: Tender Mercies [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893175





	No Reckoning

November, 2015 -- [REDACTED], Afghanistan.

The helicopter ride back to base in the lat fall of 2015 is silent as the grave but for the heavy beat of the blades keeping them in the air. Tahan sits on the floor with his legs crossed, pale with shock and still covered in splattered blood, one hand resting on the black plastic of the body bag over Alessio Rossi’s stilled heart. His skin is cold already. It’s been hours since he’d died. 

He no longer has the words to say _Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry._ if he ever did at all. They’re just feelings that swirl in his gut and leave him short of breath, nearly choking. Tahan is no stranger to death, the cold kiss of it, how it feels to personally hand a soul over to the reaper and how it feels to rip one away from her cold grip. It doesn’t help him now, sitting here on the metal floor, trembling hidden by the violent vibration of the chopper. He can’t breathe through the metallic tang of blood clouding his senses, he can’t think past the realization. 

This is his fault. 

He knows that isn’t entirely true-- Rossi knew exactly what he was getting into when he dragged the terrible secrets up to the surface, pushed to fix things. He knew the dangers, and he wanted to do it anyway because he was brave, and he was kind, and he wanted to Do The Right Thing. But Tahan just had to go to Bianchi, he'd been absolutely convinced the Colonel that had made him who he was couldn’t have been in on it, despite Rossi’s insistence that this was the case. Worse, even: that he was a ringleader. Tahan just had to see the truth for himself. And look at where it had gotten them. 

Strangely, he’s grateful to the corpse before him anyway. 

Rossi had taught him a great many things-- how to find peace in war, how to dig deep, the differences between living and surviving. He’d reminded him how to be kind, and that he needed to care in order to live, needed to dig his heels in and stand up for the little he could make himself believe in, anymore. Tahan tries to be grateful for those, now, rather than wallowing in his latest and greatest lesson: all the goodness in the world doesn’t matter at the business end of a bullet. 

And he realizes, faintly, that he really must have loved this idiot. 

His fingers have never shaken when he went to take a pulse until today. And he’s never felt such a howling emptiness in all the fifteen years of losing friends, hasn’t felt like his goddamn world was ending since he was seventeen and meeting his mother at the hospital, losing both of his parents on the same day. He’s never wanted to lay down next to someone and rot away with them, curl up at his side and beg for one more bright laugh, one more bad joke, one more strum on that stupid out of tune guitar. 

He doesn’t have the words for any of that. And Rossi can’t hear him anyway. 

_Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me._


End file.
